Scaling RAG Systems Can Hurt Accuracy If Retrieval Quality Is Ignored
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often degrade silently when knowledge bases grow large, producing plausible-sounding but incorrect answers. A corpus of tens of thousands of mixed, duplicated, or outdated documents creates far more retrieval ambiguity than a small, curated one. Vector search retrieves semantic similarity, not factual truth, meaning deprecated or off-topic chunks can outrank authoritative current sources. Problems like chunk fragmentation, stale content, and poor metadata management become the primary accuracy killers at scale. Experts recommend validating retrieval precision, applying reranking, and partitioning knowledge bases before simply adding more documents to a single index.
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